On Heritage and Homecomings
Twilight, Billings Cabin. I'm trying not to smile as I write, but the haphazard version of "Men of Dartmouth" being produced across the room by 13 freshmen is, at best, distracting. When they finish, they glance at each other self-consciously, and Ican see that the lyric has touched them. Then there is nervous laughter; it's early in this freshman trip and they still giggle at the "granite in their brains."
I may be their fearless leader, but right now I feel like a freshman myself. After all, I have been away from Dartmouth for an entire year, studying English literature at Oxford and at Harvard, and Dartmouth seems nearly as bewildering and unfamiliar to me now as it did three years ago when I was a freshman.
Ironically, the last time I visited Billings was just prior to the start of my yearlong academic odyssey. I had come here to sort out my feelings about the year ahead and my ambivalence at taking such an extended leave of absence from the College. I had then a vague sense that there was something wrong at Dartmouth. The newsworthy campus events of that year had centered mostly around alcohol abuse and irresponsible journalism, and I sensed that students were frustrated at Dartmouth's slow recovery from the turbulent changes of a few years back. Yet I did not know what, specifically, had gone wrong or how it could be helped, and the prospect of a junior year that promised to be extraordinary seemed much more important to me in a selfish way than Dartmouth's ills, or any effect I could have in curing them.
In retrospect, that year was extraordinary. In England I bicycled around the Lake District, argued my way through tutorials on Romantic Poetry, and developed impeccable tea manners. At Harvard, I coached women's crew for Dunster House and worked as a short-order cook for the other students in my living unit. However, it is only now, returning to Dartmouth, that I realize how much I have learned about my own college during the year away from it and not all of it has been good.
In England, I found Dartmouth to be generally unknown (some people confused it with Dartmoor Prison). While few students knew us, however, they were fascinated by the concept of fraternities and sororities. When I described the Greek system to them, they dismissed it as juvenile and could not understand what place it could have at a university.
At Harvard, as one might imagine, Dartmouth was much better known, but I was shocked and often embarrassed at what we were known for. No sooner would I identify myself as an exchange student from Dartmouth than I would be hit with a wave of crimson hostility. Weren't we all alcoholics? Animals? Did anyone study up there, really? One belligerent Harvard senior held me spellbound for an hour with his tirade about how Dartmouth students descend on Cambridge each year for the annual football game and trash the campus with their drunken fights. The only things Dartmouth students were good for, he said disgustedly, were drinking, fighting, and booting. I responded that there was a stereotype; Dartmouth students were no more all animals than Harvard students were all pansies. No, he said, and began another tirade about how he had grown up near Hanover, had seen how Dartmouth students behaved on their own campus. . . .
That experience left me a bit shaken. How should I have responded to him? Should I have told him that I had made the best friends of my life at Dartmouth? That I had found Dartmouth students to be bright, aware, motivated? That we had a feeling of family that I couldn't even begin to find at Harvard? Those things were all true, but what he had said was true as well, and he knew that I couldn't deny it.
My vague sense that something is wrong at Dartmouth has grown clearer; we have a serious image problem that affects us in many ways. Even if the macho, drunken Dartmouth animal were ony a myth, I know that it frightens prospective applicants to the college away, and can make accepted applicants hesitate to matriculate. On a personal level, it infuriates me that people should dismiss one of the finest colleges in the country as a perpetual party and they frequently do.
But why should we care what people think if we know Dartmouth as it really is: academic, traditional, physically lovely? We should care because of our great pride in the College and because the animal image is based on fact. The Dartmouth animal may be part of our heritage and it may be part of our folklore, but if we want Dartmouth to be the best it can be and to be seen that way by the rest of the world then the image truly has to become part of our past. Let us become as we want to be known now.
This freshman trip is a step in that direction. Tonight's conversation hastouched upon many manifestations of Dartmouth's "growing-up pains," from the trials of coeducation to the tribulations of the Dartmouth Review ("But how can they get away with printing that?"), and the mood is critical but optimistic. Off
key singing aside, these freshmen may help us to create the Dartmouth heritage we want and deserve. They may not, but at least tonight they have done something good; they have made me happy to be back.
Jean Hanff Korelitz is an English major fromNew York City, where, after her terms at Oxford and Harvard, she spent a summer internship as a magazine editor. She shares the dutiesof Undergraduate Editor and Campbell Internfor the ALUMNI MAGAZINE with Steve Farns worth '83,
